


In Screaming Color

by polytropic



Category: Haven (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Fix-It, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-22
Updated: 2016-10-22
Packaged: 2018-08-24 00:42:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8349535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polytropic/pseuds/polytropic
Summary: Five Things Evidence Ryan Stole and One Thing She Gave Away(written for the Troubled Tales 2016 challenge)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Compactor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Compactor/gifts).



> This work is a gift for Compactor in the Troubled Tales 2016 challenge! Thank you so much for the wonderful prompts you gave, and I hope this is a good fill. :D
> 
> Notes:  
> \- Underage warning is for a brief mention of people under the age of eighteen having sex.  
> \- The title is from Taylor Swift's "Out of the Woods" because seriously, I can't title things and pop songs are my only recourse here.

The first thing of any real value Evidence Ryan stole was herself. She was sixteen, and everyone in town (all 15,326 of them) knew her as "Preacher Ryan's daughter who did _you know what_ with the Phillips boy after Sunday mass." Evi's dream departure from her place of birth would have involved standing up at halftime of the homecoming football game with a megaphone and informing everyone that she had also, in fact, done 'you know what' with Cole Porter, Jason DeWitt, Katie Holt, and Amanita Jessop, that she was pretty damn proud of it actually, and that she was now off to find new exciting places full of new, exciting people to screw. However, she was at heart a very practical girl, and instead of taking the risky but emotionally satisfying route, she disappeared three days before Homecoming with her father's shotgun, what was left of her dead mother's jewelry, and half the contents of the drinks cabinet.

The second most valuable thing she ever stole (she herself would remain the most valuable, always and forever; it was the premise on which she'd left in the first place and the one uncompromising axiom of her life) was a flash drive. She was twenty-six, and everyone in the 'import-export' community knew her as the best up-and-coming retrieval expert this side of the Atlantic. She was not supposed to know what was on the drive, but unlike certain individuals she could name, Evi always figured what the client didn't know couldn't hurt her. And if she was going to crack a top-of-the-line security system and shoot a guard in the leg for the little thing, she was damn sure going to peek inside after. It turned out to a ledger of the top players in international smuggling; names, contact info, key transactions, blackmail material, you name it. It was something of a career-maker, and after that she wasn't up-and-coming any more: she was _arrived_.

The third most valuable thing she ever stole was Duke Crocker.

At this point the story, and Evi's life, become more complicated, because everything else she ever stole was the product of either meticulous planning or giddy opportunity, whereas Duke was a genuine accident. He would, from the very first moment, become the thing that tripped her up, disrupted the rhythm of her life and, more importantly, her cons.

The first in a long line of Duke Crocker and Evidence Ryan Accidents was that they both set their sights on the same merchandise. The moment when their eyes met across a crowded ballroom, her in a stunning form-fitting bright blue dress and him in a waiter's uniform, might have been romantic had her thoughts upon seeing him not consisted solely of _motherfucker, who the hell is that and why is he after my_ _score_.

(Duke would later admit that his thoughts had been, similarly prosaically, _goddamn it this is why I don't do retrieval._ )

It was not the first time Evi had run into another player on a job, of course. It _was_ the first time that someone, when muscled into a storage closet and told to back off or get shot (with the cold muzzle of her pistol at his neck for encouragement), held his hands up, widened his eyes, and said very earnestly, "Okay, wow, can't do that, but may I just say that you are lovely when you're menacing?"

She didn't shoot him. She did tie him up with extension cables, lock him in the closet, and make off with the loot.

He caught up to her as she was making her getaway, coincidentally on a boat; she often thought, afterwards, that this was yet another weird accident of fate, that she'd happened to choose the exit strategy that most played to his expertise. If she'd used her plan B, a private airfield and a small plane, instead, would their lives have ever intersected again?

As it was, though, she finished stowing her ill-gotten gains in the false compartment in the hold, emerged back above decks, and found the barrel of a gun placed rather delicately against the nape of her neck.

"You tie very tight knots," said her future husband and the person she was currently thinking of as _fuck fucking fuck motherfucking fucker_.

"Sure that was real tough for you." Her Southern drawl always came out harder when someone got the drop on her.

"It was, actually. My wrists are very sore."

The initial shock and gut-clenching terror of being held at gunpoint faded, letting a familiar calculation take its place. People fell almost universally into two categories when they had a gun on you: one, they wanted and fully intended to pull the trigger and could at any moment, or two, they did not want to pull the trigger but might if pressed. With option 1, you had to take any small flicker as a chance to run or fight because those were your only ways out; option 2 allowed for the wonderful, shining possibility of them some time in the near future putting the gun down of their own volition.

Her instinct said this was an option 2 situation.

Very slowly, her hands raised in the air placatingly, she turned around. Crocker had one foot propped casually up on a crate, and his hand on the gun was steady but also casual, not just like he'd used one plenty of times before but also like he wasn't in a huge hurry to use it now. Those were both good signs. When she met his eyes he raised his eyebrows.

"See anything you like?" He grinned. She did too, with lots of teeth.

"Yeah, I appreciate your safety being on."

"It seemed gentlemanly. So, let's make a deal, shall we? I get the loot and the boat, you get dropped off in a lifeboat, everyone walks away happy or at least alive. Sound good?"

She'd sensed he was a negotiator. Evi allowed herself to get a little more comfortable, folding her arms and propping her hip up on the bulkhead behind her.

"Counter-offer: you flip on your employer, help me fence the goods ourselves, and I cut you in for half."

"Hm. Tempting, but I have a reputation to maintain." His mouth twisted a little bit, though, and Evi wouldn't be as good as she was if she couldn't pounce on that kind of sign with everything she had.

"You're only getting a finder's fee, not a comission, aren't you," she guessed, and was rewarded by his sour face. "Aw, baby, ain't no reason you've gotta stand to be treated that way."

"Yeah, well, Rosewell made a compelling offer," he grumbled. She scrutinized his face for another moment, then grinned.

"You're sleeping with him."

He sighed. "'I'm sleeping with him."

"Cute. I'll add you to the Bi Smugglers group on Facebook."

"...is there actually…?"

"No, honey. No there's not."

Evi had been calculating carefully in her mind, and at this point, she reached a conclusion. Two steps forward, hand on the wrist and the other at the bicep, twist, yank, stomp. He ended up flat on his back on the deck, one of her boots pressing down fairly gently on the wrist that held the gun and the other resting on his stomach.

"Now. Either I dump you off this boat and you can swim back to your boyfriend--"

"Okay, hey, I do not use the 'b' word, that's so _formal_."

"--or you come with me and trade the hell up. We split our takes even, you don't have to do retrieval because I'm going to be honest, you suck at it--"

"Rude."

"--and I bet I'm better in bed than Rosewell is."

She waited out his answer, though she needn't have bothered. The grin that was stealing across his face, broad and expectant, spoke for itself.

 

After that they stole a lot more things. Duke's favorite was this fancy old compass from some Portuguese sea voyage, which was certainly ornate but also kind of boring in her opinion; Evi's favorite, much more excitingly, was a set of two carved marble and silver rings whose inscriptions, legend had it, contained a cypher that led to a secret buried in the Minoan carvings on the island of Crete.

"So fucking badass!" she enthused, rubbing her thumb over the head of one of them and admiring the shine.

"Yeah, okay, it was worth the explosion," Duke admitted, still carefully polishing the other ring with a soft cloth.

"Aw, finally done sulking, baby?"

"Just. Missed. My Head," he hissed. She sighed. Not quite done, then, apparently.

The trip to Crete was hugely fun. Evi loved treasure maps, and so did Duke, one point they were in complete and total agreement about (for once). Duke transcribed the inscriptions on the rings and started trying to break the cypher himself; Evi took her own approach, bringing a copy around to eminent Mediterranean scholars and linguists with her trusty "grad student" persona on.

About two days into their endeavors they both mutually, and without verbally acknowledging it, decided that they were in a race to see who cracked the code first. That same day Evi introduced sabotage into the equation by distracting Duke with sex and then stealing and hiding his notes underneath the laundry bin. When he resurfaced from bed (orgasms made him sleepy and her energized, an advantage she fully exploited at every opportunity) she heard his howl of rage and cackled.

Duke lost half a day trying to find his notes, in which time Evi set up a meeting with an archaeologist who said he had something that would be "very helpful" to her. She was clearly in the lead going into day three...at which point she tried to fire up the engines to take her to shore for her meeting and discovered that Duke had _disabled his own damn boat_ so that she couldn't get there.

"Okay, I'm impressed," she said, folding her arms in the doorway of the bedroom and glaring at the back of his head where he was bent over the table, scribbling into a notebook.

"Seems like you're going to be sticking around today, huh? Since you don't have much to do, want to grab me a beer from the fridge?" he asked, with a perfectly infuriating blend of innocence and smugness. He was laughing before her tackle even connected, knocking him back onto the bed and scattering his papers everywhere.

"Same trick two days in a row? Lazy," he admonished when she pinned him down by his hips and started untying the laces on his shirt.

"Well, my afternoon just opened up. You know how I hate being bored," she said, and bit him very hard on the collarbone because she couldn't quite figure out how to put into words how happy she was right then.

On day four Duke ran into trouble with some parts of the inscription that didn't make any sense. Evi, peering over his shoulder, had already realized that that was because they were faded on the rings to the point where he was transcribing them wrong, but declined to mention that.

On day five Evi talked her way into a guided tour of the ruins, at which point she discovered, to her disappointed amusement, that the "secret" in the carvings was a _linguistic_ one.

"It's about grammar," she informed Duke when she got back to the boat.

"What?" He looked up slowly, fuzzy-eyed from too much time spent staring at his own tiny handwriting.

"The secret, they think it'll help them understand the grammar structure of this one Minoan dialect." Duke blinked at her for a second, processing that, then groaned and dropped his head straight down onto the table.

"Ugh, seriously? Worst secret ever."

"Aw, c'mon, it's kind of funny."

He lifted his head enough to make it clear he was pouting, then dropped it back down again. "These are worthless to fence now, aren't they."

"Yeah somehow I don't think archeolinguists are going to offer us great prices."

"Damn." He sighed and started to pack up his notes. "Well, hey, good chase though."

" _Great_ chase," she agreed. One of the best she'd ever had, which was funny considering there was no score at the end any more.

"Yeah. Oh!" Evi raised her eyebrows in disbelief as the ring slipped out of Duke's hands and onto the floor: Duke was never, ever careless with the merchandise.

"What the hell?" she demanded.

"Oops," he said, unconvincingly, and knelt on the floor to pick it up.

Then he stayed kneeling.

The proposal and immediately subsequent marriage was always kind of a blur in Evi's memories. What she did recall, clear and crisp, was the little half-smile and the soft looked Duke's eyes when he looked up from the floor with that useless, but somehow now incredibly precious ring.

 

The one thing in her life that Evi truly, honestly regretted stealing was Duke's second-favorite boat. It was one of those accidents that happened so often around the two of them, but this one...this one was The Accident, the big one, the breakup and, as Duke would tell it, the betrayal.

She was mad. (He was mad. Things were said. Blah blah tale as old as time.) He had no goddamn call to question her plans in the field, much less to use the word "reckless" like some kind of undermining bullshit gaslight, and she wouldn't stand for that, not from anyone much less him. So she took off, because she knew that would hurt him the most; you could scream in Duke Crocker's face all night, and he'd still rather that than that you leave.

She didn't know the coast guard raid was coming. If she had, she'd probably still have left, but she'd have at least taken the loot with her so he wasn't caught with it.

She took two weeks to cool off and find the willingness to try to get back in touch with him, at which point she abruptly discovered she could no longer set foot in Taiwan because the vindictive little fucker had _pinned it all on her_. Even if she'd wanted to pick up his trail after that she couldn't; he was sticking to countries where she was wanted and contacts whose bridges she had burned, clearly on purpose. Duke Crocker's legendary ability to hold a grudge was out in force.

Well, fine. Fuck him.

She sailed his stupid boat into Swedish waters, which she knew would be hurtful because the job that had led to his ban from Sweden had gone so incredibly wrong that he still winced when he talked about it, and then sold it. To a pleasure cruise line.

That might have been going too far, she admitted from the shore as she watched the renovations destroy all of his careful work of the last five years on the vessel.

The next time she saw a surveillance photo of him, he wasn't wearing his ring, and that was that; she took hers off too, and buried it in the back of the closet in her safest safehouse, where her mother's photo and her old Sunday school Bible lay.

 

Evi will lie to everyone happily and with distinct glee, but she drew the line at lying to herself: she didn't just come to Haven to try to help Duke, she came to try to get him back. She figured it was time: she was thirty-six, ancient by the standards of their profession, and it had been six years since their little...fissure. Surely that was enough time for even Duke's ability to hold a grudge to have weakened its grasp enough for her to get some claws back in there.

What she found instead was that, once again, Duke zigged when she expected him to zag. He was angry at first, as expected, but that faded as she knew it would; Duke could never resist the camaraderie of working together on a heist. And their chemistry was still there, clear and present up against the railing of his little restaurant; she'd missed kissing him, how he threw his whole attention into it, how she could feel the _want_ in his hands and chest.

But, while she got her spot as his partner-in-crime back easily, and her spot in his bed back with only slightly more effort, her spot in his heart appeared...not necessarily occupied, but no longer vacant.

That was a problem.

She thought it was Audrey Parker at first, with her winsome smile and admittedly pretty hot 'there's only room in this here town for one of us, Rev' schtick. Then she thought it was that "Nate" guy from when they were kids, whom Duke had always readily admitted to crushing on and who had apparently grown up into a Blue Steel asshole. Then she thought it was both of them. Then neither, when his voice broke around the confession that his dad, that complete and utter fuckhead, had made him make a nonsensical promise and he was sticking with it.

She never really pinned down what exactly had changed, in the end. Only knew that at this point, the only way she was getting anything from Duke Crocker other than some pretty great sex and a place to stay while she was in Haven was if she laid herself out honestly and begged him to choose her over whatever was keeping him here.

She didn't do that. She wasn't sure it would have worked, but more importantly, she wasn't sure it would have been worth it. Evi liked things she could possess cleanly; a husband half in her arms and half in a weird creepy town that she was eighty percent sure was full of, like, vampires or something...that wasn't what she wanted. And, honestly, he had roots here that she'd have to force him to pull up, that he might resent her later for destroying. Just because Evi had burned her own ties to the past to ashes didn't mean she had to wish the same thing on him.

Haven could have Duke.

The plan, when she showed up to the police station with a bulletproof vest, some theatre blood packs, and a rehearsed speech, was to dramatically save Duke's life and then disappear into the sunset. It was showy, it was heroic, it was fun, and most importantly, it had all the style of her last dramatic exit. (It was important to keep trying to top your last impression.)

The things she did not count on, in order, were:

  1. An outbreak of a magic black vein virus of doom
  2. A hostage situation
  3. Another, coinciding yet completely separate, hostage situation
  4. Getting infected with the creepy magic plague
  5. Technically, dying
  6. Duke's face as her vision faded, shattered in a way she'd never, ever wanted to see



She woke up when the virus stopped--apparently in Haven disgusting mutant outbreak infections just floated out of one's body like a passing stormcloud, because that was _normal_ \--cursing Reverend Driscoll, Haven, Yankee assholes with assault weapons, police stations, and her own flair for the dramatic.

So in the end, Evi wasted a flawless fake death by leaving Duke a note. She hid it in the stuff she left behind in his loft; she wished for a while that she could have seen his face when he opened it, wondered if he was mad or delighted or, most likely, a bit of both. She asked him not to tell anyone--being legally dead was incredibly useful in her profession, not to mention utterly badass--and she assumed he'd comply, because Duke had always been too giving with her.

The last time she'd left a small town with secrets, Evi hadn't looked back once. The last time she'd left Duke, she'd done it because she knew what people leaving did to him, how it ate him up inside. This departure was different, and she said so in her letter to him; she tried to make it clear that she understood what a yawning gap she'd left last time, and that this time around, she hoped her words could fill in some of the pieces.

Then she headed to her most secure safehouse and cried for a little while over a silver and marble ring with a pointless secret hidden in it. Last time she left she hadn't cried, either. All kinds of new things were happening this time around.

Being dead was freeing, she found when she resurfaced. All her old warrants were closed, that one guy she'd had a fling with four years ago who wouldn't stop texting her had finally stopped, and her fake IDs were suddenly being accepted a whole lot more smoothly.

That wasn't all, though. Evi felt sixteen again; like her rebirth wasn't just a good con, but something more vital. New exciting places were opening up on the horizon, and Evidence Ryan was not out of the game yet by any means.


End file.
